"(Not Responding)" - What does it mean, and what do I do about it?

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Because for those 60 seconds your application isn't responding.

Try putting a 1 second delay in a loop of 60 iterations. The performance impact
will be negligible and Windows should be happier.

Leo

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Hi.

Firstly, let me thank you, for your reply.

I followed your suggestion, but, as long as the program is in the 60 iteration for..loop, the application shows not responding in the task manager.
I noticed one thing though, as soon as the program comes out of the loop the program returns to running state in the task manager.

Is there any other workaround?

Regards,
Mani

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I missed a step. Assuming this is VB6, add a call to DoEvents() in the 60x1
loop as well.

Not sure about VB.NET ... I believe there's something similar.

Leo
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We have a VB Application which is running on win 2003(Application Server) and SQL 2005(cluster DB), to handle the performance we run around 4 instance of the same VB application on the same Application server. When we run more than 2 instances of the application (around 4), these few of the instances are going to NOT RESPONDING stage for a while and coming back to normal, this is happening for all the instances randomnly. But the CPU utilization is less than 10% and the server is normal and responding, only Apps are going to Not Responding stage.

We have recently migrated these apps from Win 2000 and SQL 2000 to new server with Win 2003 and SQL 2005 from then we are observing this issue.

Please help me if you have any solution for this.

Regards,
Srini

Dear Leo,

I usually log in to my Bebo account about twice a day. I enter the site http://www.bebo.com/ into my browser/address bar, and the main page always comes up with the space to enter your username and password.

I would usually type in my username and password and my home page would appear with the ch-ch-changes and all that jazz, but today when I entered my details and pressed enter to sign in, only the header of my Bebo home page loaded and then the program came up with "(Not Responding)". It has never done this before and I have no idea why. I had to close the window and reopen my browser again. I wondered if Bebo was under maintinance for the time or something, so I typed in one of my friends username and password (still using the same computer) and it took me to her home page no problem. Why is my Bebo page not working all of a sudden? Please help me! By the way, all my other internet programs/websites I visit are working absolutely fine, it's just my Bebo home page with the problem.

Regards,
Kim.

hi leo
every time i use my anti-spyware program
spybot s&d it works perfectly untill the actual
deletion off my spyware than it comes up with
a not responding sign why is that
ps i put a fake email adress since i have over 1000
unread and junk emails

Hi Leo,
I read your text on the 'not responding' state of windows XP. I write some small applications myself (delphi) and when these applications have some bigger tasks to do, windows also consider them as "not responding". I built in some progress reports in my applications (10% complete, 20% etc) and when windows decides that my program is "not responding" these progress reports no longer are updated. my question is. with these longer tasks, is there a way to still remain responding according to windows ?

Leo,

Your article is interesting and helps me understand what might be happening, I wonder if you have missed some other scenario. Many applications are multi-threaded, and as such perform most of their long running or CPU intensive work in a thread that does not interact with the UI. In applications like this, there should be no 'Not Responding' scenarios. However, I do see applications that this occur even though they are multi-threaded. Is there any way that the OS is actually causing the application to not respond to the OS's request to the application?

In your example, you wrote the application so it was easy to determine the problem. Is there a way to determine what an unresponsive application is doing? In your case, it was network I/O, this would have caused your application to block on the OS's low level I/O.

Thanks for any thoughts..

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I've actually never found a reliable way for non-programmers to answer "what is
this application waiting for" when it hangs. The developer, of course, can run
the application in a debugger and often see exactly what;s going on, but those
resources are not available to the average user.

Naturally multiple threads need to interact. Typically if a UI thread hangs
even though there's another worker thread doing the heavy lifting, it's because
the UI thread is in fact waiting for something from that worker thread, or
there's a syncronization problem between the two. (OR there's something in the
UI that needs waiting for.)

Thanks,

Leo

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I have 'one' program, Incredimail, that is non responding. I have done a system restore, uninstalled and reinstalled the program, all with the same results. The home screen comes up but the cursor does nothing when I click on a task to do. The Incredimail support people have been making suggestions but nothing useful. All of my emails and address book is tied up. No other programs are running except Windows so I don't think it is a math delay. Any suggestions? I know when I uninstall not everything is deleted so when I reinstall I get the same results.

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